Norwegian author Jon Fosse has been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable, said the Swedish Academy. It added that Fosse is today one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world and has become increasingly recognized for his prose. The human condition is the central theme of Fosse’s body of work, irrespective of genre, it said.

The Nobel Prize committee said that Jon Fosse presents everyday situations that are instantly recognizable in people's lives. Fosse's radical reduction of language and dramatic action expresses the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest terms, it said praising the author. Fosse has now joined an illustrious list of past winners that ranges from Toni Morrison to Ernest Hemingway.